Personal health monitors provide users with the ability to monitor their overall health and fitness by enabling the user to monitor heart rate or other physiological information during exercise, athletic training, rest, daily life activities, physical therapy, etc. Such devices are becoming increasingly popular as they become smaller and more portable.
In addition to providing bodily performance information such as heart rate and breathing rate, a personal health monitor may also provide performance information about the current activity, e.g., duration, distance, cadence, etc. As with many parameters, however, the accurate determination of such information may be compromised by noise.
A user's cadence enables the user to monitor their current performance relative to their personal goals, and therefore represents a particularly useful piece of activity performance information. As used herein, a cadence represents the number of repetitions per minute. For example, when the user is moving on foot, the cadence represents the number of foot repetitions or steps per minute. When the user is moving on wheels, the cadence represents the number of cycle repetitions (e.g., crank or pedal revolutions) per minute.
Conventional devices may monitor the cycling cadence, for example, using a cyclocomputer. A sensor system mounted to the crank arm and frame of the bicycle counts the number of wheel rotations per minute to determine the cycling cadence. While such devices are useful and reasonably accurate, they are cumbersome and cannot easily be used with multiple bicycles. Further, such devices cannot provide an accurate estimate of the number of steps per minute taken, e.g., by a runner. Thus, there remains a need for more portable devices capable of measuring a user cadence in a wide variety of scenarios.